


faceless forgotten

by GingerBeer42



Series: snapshots taken (before the world burns) [1]
Category: Purple Hyacinth (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Internal Monologue, Kinda, Missing Scene, Overuse Of Parentheses, Short, legit the only thing i can write is introspective angst, only 700 words smh, the tags'll prob be longer than the thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24885517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerBeer42/pseuds/GingerBeer42
Summary: People don’t expect the Purple Hyacinth to draw in his free time, notorious mass-murderer with an ever-lengthening list of the dead as he is. But people don’t expect many things.
Series: snapshots taken (before the world burns) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1803001
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	faceless forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, look I wrote something that's not Doctor Who!! This will never happen again. 
> 
> Thanks to [Andromicat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andromicat/) for betaing this thing and dealing with my weirdness!

People don’t expect the Purple Hyacinth to draw in his free time, notorious mass-murderer with an ever-lengthening list of the dead as he is. But people don’t expect many things. 

The pencil twitches from where it’s lightly held in his hands, the soft graphite smudging onto the paper. A barely-visible line streaks across what was, seconds ago, an unblemished expanse of milky white. Like the clean cut of a sword, only the slow drip of deep crimson blood indicating where he’d struck (he likes swords, they’re more personal, without the contradictory mechanical coldness and yet bloodied messiness of a gun). 

He continues, expert strokes of the pencil sketching out the shape of a person, arms, fingers, hands emerging from a blank void. Black on white. A dark blemish contrasting with a pale backdrop. Like his name. Like the Phantom Scythe, an ominous stain on Ardhalis’s outward beauty. 

He never draws faces. Perhaps it’s a way of distancing himself from the many deaths he’s seen (caused), a way of extracting some semblance of sanity from the now-mindless routine of killing (it’s been the normal for him, ever since he could remember, and isn’t there something wrong with that?), but the people he draws are always blank slates, a smudge of dark gray marking where their eyes should be. 

He remembers all the people he’s killed, all the souls he’s seen drain out of their vessels as he gazes impassively, a reaper come to collect his burden, emotions shut away lest they utterly overwhelm him. If he tries, he knows he can recreate them with the same perfect accuracy with which he captures their hands, hair, clothes… 

But he can’t. He can’t let the grimness of his day job contaminate the one thing he has left of his past. 

His life before he became an assassin is a blur, a confused recollection of pain and sorrow and grief and anger and what could be, if he narrows his eyes and looks sideways at it, happiness (he doesn’t know what that feels like, but he can guess). 

Sometimes, in the deep dark of another sleepless night, book in his hands as he crouches by a half-melted candle, eyes unseeingly scanning over familiar words in its dim, inconstant light, he affords himself the luxury of feeling sorrow over what he’s lost, over the undone words and flashes of euphoria scrubbed out of existence.

His first truly clear memory is of course of his first kill. The weight of the sword in his hands as it dripped thick scarlet blood onto the carpet, the blank and staring eyes of the body whose life he ended. But he remembers glimpses, precious, tantalizing remnants of  _ warmth love joy _ that somehow escaped erasure in the painful process of reprogramming that made him what he is, and the first time (that he remembers) he found a pencil in his hand, he knew what he could do.

The same way he knew then, that he could draw, is the same way he knows now that all the faces in his mind will depict themselves on paper with a few strokes of his pencil. But he never lets them, never dares to finish a sketch past the delicate strokes of hair and clothes before bundling it into the unmarked dossier where he keeps all his artwork (out of sight and out of mind). 

Of all the faces he should draw, Lauren’s is the most prominent. Officer, co-conspirator, partner… friend? 

No, no. He mustn’t go that far. The most feared assassin in the city, with a death toll so high even the most ridiculous estimates never make it close… He doesn’t deserve such comfort as a friend. He’ll inevitably drag her down with him (and perhaps he already has). 

One day, the Leader will catch wind of their little operation. It’s entirely possible, even probable that whispers of his treachery have already circulated among the highest ranks of the Phantom Scythe, rumors of the mysterious Lune whispered at secret meetings and midnight rendezvous. One way or another, they will come crashing down. One way or another, this will end in death. 

But until then, all Kieran can do is wait, and plot, and sketch. 

**Author's Note:**

> Legit thought of and basically completely outlined at 2 AM while trying to sleep and I somehow managed to remember it long enough to write it down in the morning. I'm impatient AF so here it is now without much editing other than random chopping of my overly long and complicated sentences.
> 
> Working title was "welp my brain came up with this at 3 in the morning and it’s somehow stayed with me until now so here goes". Alternate title "f*ck this. kern angst."
> 
> LINKS LINKS LINKS!  
> [Purple Hyacinth on Line WEBTOON](https://www.webtoons.com/en/mystery/purple-hyacinth/list?title_no=1621)  
> [Our chaotic wasteland of an official Discord server](https://discord.gg/MRyCG3)  
> And again my wonderful beta and partner in crime [Andromicat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andromicat/) (go read their fics!!).
> 
> Loved it? Hated it? Want Lauren to shoot me? Want to impale my writing with a sword then hang its blood-stained corpse off a chandelier?? The comments are open for assassinations and other attempts on my existence (because I don’t have a life) and that of my really bad writing!!


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